pezenfuego
Active Member
“Do not try to bend the spoon, that’s impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth: there is no spoon.” Yesterday I was at Taco Bell with my brother and he began raving about the ingenuity that went into the amalgam of the fork and spoon. The utensil he was referring to is called a “spork” and is the combination of both a spoon and a fork. “This resulting utensil” he reasoned, “was the greatest invention of the twentieth century.” He continued to talk of the greatness of the spork and to this I had no objection.
Later, I continued to ponder this subject and I found a fundamental flaw in the synergy of these two apparatuses. I decided to conduct an experiment that compared the spork’s usefulness to that of the fork and spoon. The foods I decided to test the utensil on included: pasta, soup, chicken, jell-o, and pudding. My experiment was to simply eat each of these foods with a spoon, a fork, and a spork. The first food I tested was the chicken. I found that the rounded sides of the spork and spoon were equally useless at cutting the chicken. The fork, however, cut the chicken beautifully. When it came to actually picking up the pieces of chicken, the spork was again useless. The prongs on the spork were too short to properly penetrate the flesh and get an adequate grip on the food. The spork’s prongs were also rounded, which caused skewering to be even more difficult.
When attempting to eat the pasta, I found that using the spork prongs was a bad idea. Due to their limit in length, the prongs could only pick up a small amount of pasta. When I tried using the entire spork to twirl the spaghetti, the rounded edges of the utensil prevented the pasta from staying on the spork. This concluded that the spork was inadequate at fulfilling its duty as a fork.
When it came to eating soup, I made yet another discovery. The prongs on the spork need gaps in order to function as a fork. These gaps are like holes in the utensil. The spork was only able to hold slightly more soup than the fork. The rate at which I was consuming the soup was approximately five times slower with a spork than with a spoon.
The final two foods I tried actually transcended my expectations. When used with jell-o, the spork maintained parity with the spoon. While a fork also worked, it was certainly not as effective as the spork.
The last food I tried was pudding. A fork was useless when it came to eating pudding. The spork seemed to do the job more efficiently. The spoon showed its superiority when I learned that it was capable of holding approximately twenty-five percent more pudding than the spork. The ridges of the spork allowed that twenty-five percent of pudding to escape. One more important observation I made was that when eating jell-o and pudding with a spork, I managed to stab myself in the tongue on multiple occasions. This was the final straw that made me realize how ineffective a spork is at doing a spoon’s job.
The final conclusion that I came to was that the spork failed at matching the abilities of both the fork and the spoon. The reason for this is that in order to make a spork as effective as a fork, you have to make the ridges deeper. By making the ridges deeper, you render the tool useless at eating nonsolid foods. Finding a happy medium to the conundrum is apparently impossible. While some may argue that the spork is the best of both worlds, I would have to disagree and actually argue that it has all of the negative attributes of its parent utensils without any of the positive attributes. I feel that I have proven that a spork is the most useless eating utensil available on the market today. The fact that it is not a standardized and readily available eating utensil shows how flawed it actually is. Unfortunately, my brother has not accepted my logic and we still have divergent opinions on the matter.
Later, I continued to ponder this subject and I found a fundamental flaw in the synergy of these two apparatuses. I decided to conduct an experiment that compared the spork’s usefulness to that of the fork and spoon. The foods I decided to test the utensil on included: pasta, soup, chicken, jell-o, and pudding. My experiment was to simply eat each of these foods with a spoon, a fork, and a spork. The first food I tested was the chicken. I found that the rounded sides of the spork and spoon were equally useless at cutting the chicken. The fork, however, cut the chicken beautifully. When it came to actually picking up the pieces of chicken, the spork was again useless. The prongs on the spork were too short to properly penetrate the flesh and get an adequate grip on the food. The spork’s prongs were also rounded, which caused skewering to be even more difficult.
When attempting to eat the pasta, I found that using the spork prongs was a bad idea. Due to their limit in length, the prongs could only pick up a small amount of pasta. When I tried using the entire spork to twirl the spaghetti, the rounded edges of the utensil prevented the pasta from staying on the spork. This concluded that the spork was inadequate at fulfilling its duty as a fork.
When it came to eating soup, I made yet another discovery. The prongs on the spork need gaps in order to function as a fork. These gaps are like holes in the utensil. The spork was only able to hold slightly more soup than the fork. The rate at which I was consuming the soup was approximately five times slower with a spork than with a spoon.
The final two foods I tried actually transcended my expectations. When used with jell-o, the spork maintained parity with the spoon. While a fork also worked, it was certainly not as effective as the spork.
The last food I tried was pudding. A fork was useless when it came to eating pudding. The spork seemed to do the job more efficiently. The spoon showed its superiority when I learned that it was capable of holding approximately twenty-five percent more pudding than the spork. The ridges of the spork allowed that twenty-five percent of pudding to escape. One more important observation I made was that when eating jell-o and pudding with a spork, I managed to stab myself in the tongue on multiple occasions. This was the final straw that made me realize how ineffective a spork is at doing a spoon’s job.
The final conclusion that I came to was that the spork failed at matching the abilities of both the fork and the spoon. The reason for this is that in order to make a spork as effective as a fork, you have to make the ridges deeper. By making the ridges deeper, you render the tool useless at eating nonsolid foods. Finding a happy medium to the conundrum is apparently impossible. While some may argue that the spork is the best of both worlds, I would have to disagree and actually argue that it has all of the negative attributes of its parent utensils without any of the positive attributes. I feel that I have proven that a spork is the most useless eating utensil available on the market today. The fact that it is not a standardized and readily available eating utensil shows how flawed it actually is. Unfortunately, my brother has not accepted my logic and we still have divergent opinions on the matter.
